Yes, I finally saw the gods of metal. And they were loud! Metallica played a unique show in France for their Black Album 20th Anniversary tour last Saturday. They were opened by Gojira (horrible sound, unfathomable music, barf) and The Kills (poorly mixed and honestly, The Kills opening for Metallica? Weird). About 9h20, The Ecstasy of Gold started playing with a spaghetti western movie clip (The Good, The Bad and The Ugly I think) and they exploded on the stage with their first track off their first album, Hit the Lights. After that blistering performance, they rolled directly into Master of Puppets. And if that wasn’t intense enough, the dug back into Kill Em All with No Remorse and Ride the Lightning with To Whom the Bell Tolls. I can’t remember any breaks in there at all, just pure metal mania. They then played the only song all night that was less than 20 years old, Hell and Back off of the Beyond Magnetic EP. We then saw a short montage about the recording and release of the Black Album and got treated to all 12 tracks in reverse order. All of them were amazing, in particular, Nothing Else Matters was crushingly beautiful and Enter Sandman had some cool explosions and stuff accompanying the opening gunfire. There was a slight pause and then the rolled through the classics of Battery and One. And for a final treat, specially dedicated to us Parisians, Seek and Destroy – again from Kill Em All.

Overall, the concert sound for a stadium was really clean. The video was interesting – sometimes silly but it was good to see the closeups since we were so far back. The fireworks and fire were really cool too. It would have been nice to hear a few other songs off Death Magnetic, but then it is so rare to hear the entire Black album that I won’t leave that Unforgiven.